Macau is the place where Europe and China first met and never quite let go. For more than four centuries a Portuguese trading post on the southern edge of the Pearl River Delta, it was handed back to China in 1999 and has since become the world's biggest gaming city, overtaking Las Vegas in 2007. The result is a peninsula of pastel churches, cobbled squares and incense-thick temples sitting a few kilometres from a reclaimed strip of mega-resorts that copy Venice, Paris and London at full scale.
It is also a compact city that rewards slow exploring. The whole Historic Centre, inscribed by UNESCO in 2005, fits into a morning on foot, and with a self-guided audio guide playing as you walk, each façade and temple courtyard tells you why it is there: a Jesuit college, a mandarin's family compound, a barracks built for soldiers from Goa. Then take a bus across the water to Taipa and Coloane for egg tarts, black-sand beaches and a very different kind of skyline.
Start at the Ruins of St. Paul's
Every visit begins with the same climb: 68 granite steps up to the Ruins of St. Paul's, the carved stone façade that is all that survived when the Jesuit church of 1602–1640 burned during a typhoon in 1835. Look closely and you find Chinese lions, Japanese chrysanthemums and a Portuguese caravel sharing the same baroque wall — the audio guide walks you through the iconography tier by tier. Right beside it, Monte Fort was built by the same Jesuits to defend the college; its cannons famously fired on a Dutch fleet in 1622, and today the ramparts give the best free view of the peninsula. Inside the fort, the Macao Museum lays out the story of the meeting of two cultures, from Ming-era fishing village to modern gaming capital.
Senado Square and the Portuguese heart
A five-minute walk downhill, Senado Square is the civic heart of old Macau, paved in the same black-and-white calçada waves you see in Lisbon and ringed with butter-yellow, pink and cream colonial façades. The cream-and-white St. Dominic's Church, founded by Spanish Dominicans in 1587, anchors the top of the square, while at the bottom the Holy House of Mercy — a charitable brotherhood founded in 1569 that ran the city's first hospital and orphanage — faces the Leal Senado building across the main street. Your guide explains why this square, not a cathedral, was the centre of Portuguese Macau.
A-Ma Temple and the old Inner Harbour
The city's name comes from a temple. A-Ma Temple, built in 1488 and dedicated to Mazu, the goddess of seafarers, was already here when Portuguese sailors landed and asked where they were; "A-Ma-Gau", the bay of A-Ma, became Macau. Its shrines climb a granite hillside in a haze of coiled incense. Nearby, the Mandarin's House is a sprawling 1869 courtyard residence of the reformist thinker Zheng Guanying, a rare surviving example of a wealthy Chinese family compound with Western touches. Along the same hillside, the Moorish Barracks were built in 1874 to house a regiment brought from Goa to police the colony, which is why a Portuguese city has a Mughal-arcaded building.
Up to Guia and the Macau Tower
For the view, ride the cable car up to Guia Fortress and Lighthouse, the highest point on the peninsula, where a 1622 chapel with newly rediscovered frescoes stands beside the first modern lighthouse on the Chinese coast (1865). Across town on the waterfront, the Macau Tower Convention and Entertainment Center is the modern counterpart: a 338-metre tower with a glass-floored observation deck and, at 233 metres, the world's highest commercial bungy jump for anyone who wants their history lesson followed by adrenaline.
The Cotai Strip after dark
Cotai did not exist a generation ago; it is reclaimed land between the islands of Taipa and Coloane, and it now holds the densest cluster of integrated resorts on Earth. The Venetian Macao was the pioneer, complete with gondoliers singing under a painted sky along an indoor Grand Canal. Next door, The Parisian rises behind a half-scale Eiffel Tower you can climb, and The Londoner Macao has rebuilt Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, with red phone boxes to match. Even if you never touch a gaming table, an evening walking the Strip — listening to how a marshy flat became this — is one of Asia's strangest and most entertaining spectacles.
Taipa Village and Coloane
Ten minutes from the casinos, Taipa Village is the antidote: narrow lanes, shophouses and the pedestrian Rua do Cunha, a street lined with almond-cookie shops, pork-chop-bun stalls and Portuguese restaurants. On the edge of the village, the five mint-green Taipa Houses, built in the 1920s for senior civil servants, are now a small museum of Macanese domestic life. Further south, Coloane is still a fishing village at heart. The buttercup-yellow Chapel of St. Francis Xavier overlooks a waterfront square where Lord Stow's Bakery invented the Macau-style Portuguese egg tart in 1989, and a short bus ride away Hac Sa Beach — "black sand" in Cantonese — is the place to end the day with the South China Sea at your feet.
Getting around
Macau is small enough that the historic peninsula is entirely walkable, and the free casino shuttle buses that run between the ferry terminals, the border gates and the Cotai resorts are the city's unofficial public transport. The Light Rapid Transit line links Taipa, Cotai and the Barra district near A-Ma Temple. Arriving from Hong Kong takes about an hour by high-speed ferry or by bus across the 55-kilometre Hong Kong–Zhuhai–Macau Bridge; from Zhuhai you simply walk through the Gongbei border crossing. Bring both patacas and Hong Kong dollars, which are accepted almost everywhere.